Interspecies Collaboration in Art

""In many cultural fields honeybees reveal themselves as a highly generative species; one that humans have become dependent on.  Within the backdrop of Colony Collapse Disorder, this essay examines how live bees are used in the production of art works.  Historically, bees have been an absent presence in art as artists have relied upon bees for the raw material they create (wax, honeycomb) and for their metaphorical value.  Most recently, bees themselves have become art by being transformed into sculptural objects or employed in collaborative insect/human performances that depend upon their embodied labor and participation. Using a bee-centric approach, we track the bees’ path across human art worlds, attentive to the complex ecological, agricultural, and cultural systems they co-create. These interspecies exchanges testify not only to trends in contemporary art, but larger ideas about animal/human boundaries and contemporary environmental issues.
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This paper will be in two parts. The first will start from the premise that the term ‘performance studies’ means different things in different contexts. Specifically, the paper will address the distinction between i) “Performance Studies” understood as a discipline that emerged largely as a challenge to Theatre Studies in the US in the 1980s and 90s – thanks in large part to the work of Richard Schechner, and ii) performance studies understood as ‘the scholarly study of musical performance’ (Rink 2005: x) which, again since the 1980s, has constituted a rapidly growing area of research within music and musicology. Having outlined the distinction, but also areas of shared concern, I will offer some preliminary observations as to what the value might be of greater levels of communication between these two versions of performance studies. The second part of the paper will introduce the emerging field of Performance Philosophy as one site in which precisely these kinds of interdisciplinary exchange might take place. Here, I will focus on the concept of music performance as philosophy – drawing from scholars such as Andrew Bowie to suggest that we need not think of philosophy as simply one more source of methodologies which might be applied to musical performance, but of music performance itself as the site of a kind of philosophical thinking in its own right.

By examining two exemplary cases, this paper addresses the contemporary phenomenon of artistic collaborations between human and non-human animals, which is referred to as interspecies art. Interspecies art has become increasingly significant since the beginning of the twenty-first century and excels at challenging binary oppositions by crediting animals’ creative abilities. Located within the field of human-animal studies, this article combines art historical methods with agency concepts derived from praxeology and action theory. The innovative approach of connecting these ideas of animal agency with interspecies art provides the framework to analyse Aaron Angell’s Gallery Peacetime inhabited by axolotls and CMUK, an interspecies collective consisting of humans and parrots. In order to make the animals’ participation visible as well as to provide a deeper understanding of interspecies art, these specific human-animal relations are examined using Lisa Jevbratt’s and Jessica Ullrich’s criteria for interspecies art and Mieke Roscher’s concepts of entangled and relational agency. This analysis is complemented by a field study and proves to be fertile for revealing the animals’ strong involvement in the artworks as well as beyond the art context.
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Vorliegend werden zwei Agency-Konzepte nach der Historikerin Mieke Roscher in Fallbeispielen aus dem Kunstkontext erprobt und auf Aaron Angell's "Gallery Peacetime" und das Interspezies-Kollaborativ CMUK angewendet.

“Responding to Dogs,” explores the author’s significant experiences with canine companions Tom and Sugi, and the day-to-day events that led to interspecies collaborative art productions. The essay asks, can ethics of care be integrated into aesthetic processes with more-than-human others, specifically dogs? The investigation weaves interpersonal relatings and respectful human-canine discussion into an argument for communication ethics. Interspecies communication is explored for its response potential—compassionate action based on sensing and feeling, combined with respect for difference. The essay focuses on the creative processes of EPIC_Tom (2014-16), a performance and installation project carried out with the participation of the dogs. Their vocal and gestural communications are explored using new media forms, and music and sound-making methods, such as deep listening, call and response, and musicking. The project proposes methods that allow for the relinquishment of human-centric authorship for potentials offered by interspecies creativity.

Wait is a short paper titled after the artwork of the same name by Julie Andreyev, Simon Lysander Overstall and canine collaborators Tom and Sugi, installed in SIGGRAPH Art Gallery, 2011. The project explores the human-companion species relationship, using installation techniques of computer vision and interactive video. In the installation a life-size video projection shows a dog walking towards the gallery visitor. If the visitor continues to stand in position, the dog will also stand and wait, observing the visitor. If the visitor turns to leave, the dog also walks away.  In Wait, the canine is presented in relational tension with the human. The project asks whether human states of consciousness can be brought to bear in relation to the canine gaze.

In her project Blood in the Water, the Lebanese architectural researcher and designer Ala Tannir delineates an extraordinary “interspecies alliance”: when migrant boats sink in the Mediterranean, the agglomeration of bodies causes phytoplankton to densify around them, forming large red clouds of algae in the seawater that are visible on satellite imagery. Tannir’s speculative combination of drowning forensics, maritime ecology, and border surveillance shows the impossibility of dissociating ‘natural’ from ‘socio-political’ phenomena and looks for alternative viewpoints that dissolve the boundaries between human and non-human.

This echoes not only Michel Serres’ “Biogea”, the sphere of living beings and elements that challenges man’s narcissistic sovereignty and forces us “to let the world enter our political relations” (Times of Crisis). By addressing various issues of perceptibility – the invisible drowned body, the underwater world emerging to the surface, the sensory system of border control – it also evokes Serres’ view of Jules Michelet, of the volatile contact zone between la mer and its biographer who goes out to the shore but hesitates at this liminal position since the sea is a barrier to vision’s “epistemology of light” (Hermes IV: La distribution). Beyond that, the subject’s dangerous proximity (“at once the I is extinguished”) is complemented by an equally precarious object: both Tannir’s algal blooms and Serres/Michelet’s image of the sea as milky primeval soup suggest a fluid, diffuse formlessness that may generate life or breed decay, but can no longer be perceived as a contoured or ‘individual’ phenomenon.

In view of such dissolved subjectivities and objectivities, of the interpenetration of human/animal/element that marks a “strange exit from the strictly political”, of Michel Serres’ (or the migrant’s) attentive eye being changed “into that of the sea itself, […] a green spherical abyss” (Biogea), our paper tries to describe possible positions for a ‘post-human observer’ as well as possible consistencies of a ‘post-human event’ that nevertheless take into account sharply defined geo-political struggles and concrete demarcations. With reference to Ala Tannir’s Blood in the Water and other video works or installations (Solid Sea [Multiplicity, 2002]; Liquid Traces [Charles Heller & Lorenzo Pezzani, 2014]; Purple Sea [Khaled Abdulwahed & Amel Alzakout, 2020]) we want to look for those indeterminable and impure positions – or hypositions – between fluid and solid that allow for both an oceanic and forensic gaze.